One of the glasses of wine disappeared. I looked up to see Geoffrey.
‘What happened to yours?’ he asked.
‘Cooled me. What happened to yours?’
‘Having a crap or something.’ He shrugged. ‘But she’s coming back. Is yours coming back?’
‘You never know. What’s yours like?’
‘Fantastic. Bi-ig tits.’
‘So I saw. But what’s she like?’
7 don’t know. Just likes dancing and drinking. We haven’t talked that much.’
And he asked me: ‘What’s with all this “what’s she like”?’
‘Yeah, sorry. Is she going to fuck you, do you think?’
He nodded, eyes closed.
The record ended. I didn’t dare turn round.
‘Hey,’ said Geoffrey, ‘yours is kissing that guy.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah but… they’re saying goodbye. He’s pulling out.’
I looked. The white suit was backing away; Rachel swivelled on her heel and walked towards us.
‘She’s coming,’ I whispered. ‘Be flash. Say we’re a group or something.’
Geoffrey was brilliant. He looked good and talked with confidence. Allusively he lowered names. He plugged me with stooge feed lines, pretended he had never heard two of (some say) my funniest anecdotes. He stole a full bottle of wine from the kitchen. And, it transpired, Rachel vaguely knew Geoffrey’s sister. The dialogue was bringing regular smiles to Rachel’s full brown lips – to reveal credibly flawed teeth; the top two front ones overlapped slightly, giving a sharp prow to the otherwise semicircular line of white; a felicitous touch, I always think. Everything went beautifully until the return of Geoffrey’s. Geoffrey’s was called Anna, and was therefore Swedish, which seemed rather to come as a bolt out of the blue as far as Geoffrey was concerned.
The general tone of the gathering was lowered at this point. Not that Anna wasn’t perfectly charming, only that from Rachel’s point of view it was so obviously me and my pull and Geoffrey and his pull getting together to plan a spotty removal to someone’s house or flat or room to drink quarts of weak instant coffee and listen to records and be made inefficient passes at – precisely what Geoffrey and I had in mind. For the party was disintegrating quickly now. There remained only one or two drunken couples, some po-faced wankers, and the odd unattached (and so presumably pretty seriously deformed) girl.
‘Look, I ought to help clear up,’ said Rachel.
‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘Don’t do that. Leave it to whoever was frivolous and conceited enough to give the party.’
Geoffrey joined in with some vehemence. ‘No, fuck all this,’ he argued. ‘Why not come back to our place instead?” He stroked Anna’s shoulder. Anna smiled.
‘No, I really will clear up.’
‘What the devil for?’ I asked.
‘Because it’s my party. I live here. All right ? I hope you had a good time.’
We watched her go.
‘How fucking funny,’ said Geoffrey. ‘Charles, you’re well away there.’
Suddenly Norman bellowed down the stairs.
‘Hey, Charles, are you in?’
‘Yeah,’ I shouted, standing.
‘Oh,’ he roared back, but didn’t say anything.
‘I’ll come up.’
Norman was in the kitchen fighting a cardboard box.
‘What’s in it?’
‘Cider,’ Norman gasped.
Eventually he wrestled all the string and paper into an armful-sized bundle and forced it down the Aga, stirring the coals with a broom-handle so that the box burned up with a deep and satisfying roar.
‘Where’d you get it?’
‘Fell off a lorry.’
‘Christ,’ I said. ‘Surprised it didn’t smash open. Did you -‘
‘No, cunt,’ said Norman, now crouching in front of the keg and filling two pub-style pint-glasses. ‘Stolen. Got it off a mate. Two quid. Retails at four thirty-five.’
I coughed and took off my spectacles. ‘Does it make you extra pissed?’
Norman handed me my glass, drank his in one, and crouched again to refill it.
‘Where’s Jenny gone?’ I asked.
‘Up west, shopping, with some foreign tart from Bristol.’
‘When’ll she be back? Any idea?’
‘Don’t ask me.’
I watched my brother-in-law, his fat nose inches from the tap, his eyes eager, expectant. Norman was wearing what he always wore: dowdy blue business suit, boyish shirt open at the neck (the tip of a spangled red tie hung out of his side pocket); his trousers, python-tight from the knee down, came to an end a good two or three inches from some really utterly preposterous black fur shoes. Amazing. I wouldn’t get ten yards dressed like that. Norman straightened up, looked with hostility at my glass, and went through the sliding doorway into the adjoining room. ‘Yeah, it does make you quite pissed.’ He lobbed himself on to the chesterfield by the window. ‘Friend of mine’, he continued monotonously, ‘had three pints of this, fell out a bedroom window and smashed his head open on the railings.’